Thursday, September 28, 2006

Jen Terrasa Candidate For County Council District 3 Has Good Ideas On Route 1 Development

Jen Terrasa, Candidate for Howard County Council District 3, has some good ideas about the development of Route 1 in Howard County. The Route 1 corridor is theplace in Howard County where a more urban environment should be created for the county. Route 1 should be the first place where Metro service is brought into the county. It also is the place where smart development should take place by creating multiuse building that combine offices, stores, restaurants and condos-apartments. This "new" downtown could provide the environment where young couples, new families and retirees could live, work and play in the county. Development is coming to the county whether we like it or not, so we need more candidates with vision, like Jen, to move Howard County in the right direction.

5 Comments:

"Route 1 should be the first place where Metro service is brought into the county"??

Metro costs $350 million to $1 billion per mile. Do you want your tax dollar spent on a mass transit solution that expen$ive?

Do you want senior citizens to be waiting in bad weather or at night for the next Metro to arrive?

Do you think the families and the creative class are going to be ok with Metro shutting down at a certain time each night, requiring them to work their schedules around the Metro?

Do you think a lot of people will make the transition to Metro, which still requires stopping at every station on their way? It makes each commute like a cross-country flight that has 15 connecting stops.

Metro is too expensive and too inconvenient to provide the robust mass transit system our area needs. Instead, personal rapid transit would be less expensive, more convenient (it waits for you, not vice versa), faster (it travels directly from the passenger's origin to their specific destination without intermediate stops), and be able to have more and more convenient stations.

Jen obviously has not spent enough time in the route 1 area or any where out of here safe haven of Columbia to realize that Route 1 does not have the space currently to have metro expanded. The only availabe space would be the Mark train station in P.G. County off of Main Street in Laurel. This is also not a county issue, but rather a state and national issue since Metro is subsidized by the federal and state governments and decisions about expanding would not be a county issue. It is nice to see that Jen is well informed of county issues.